13 Professional Land Surveyors of Oregon | www.plso.org Book Review Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World Reviewed by John Thatcher, PLS Land is not specifically about surveying. Rather, it is a history—thoroughly researched and engagingly written by a best-selling author of many books (if you haven’t read The Professor and the Madman, I leave it here as a teaser). I believe history is important, and often fascinating, illuminating and frightening. Land delivers. The book is dedicated to Chief Standing Bear, whose image appears with the caption, “In 1879, the U.S. government declared this Ponca chief to be a ‘person’ under the law. But they still took away his lands.” The reader now has a taste of the flavor of the book. The author, Simon Winchester, takes the reader around the world to explore many cultures and how they each have dealt with, and are dealing with, ownership of the earth’s crust. His starting point is a discussion of a deed he had acquired for a tract of land in the village of Amenia, New York, near the Connecticut border. From there the reader is taken all over the globe to explore how land ownership is handled and how it has impacted indigenous peoples, current citizens, governments, and the environment. A (very) small sampling of the issues Winchester takes on follows: • The need for ownership and demarcation of boundaries arising from the beginnings of soil cultivation, as humans transitioned from nomadic to agricultural lifestyles. • The history of the effort to determine the size of our planet. • The “rewilding” movement. • The taking of land from Indigenous peoples, including the Oklahoma Land Rush. On the morning of April 22, 1889, the already-surveyed town of Guthrie, Oklahoma, had a population of zero. At sundown the population was 15,000. • The incredible story of the creation of Flevoland, The Netherlands, by the construction of a 20-mile-long barrier dam at the neck of the Zuider Zee. The result of this engineering scheme was to tame a wild part of the North Sea and create an additional 1.2 million acres of dry land for development. • “The right to roam harmlessly across a landscape…,” most notably in Scotland and in Scandinavia. The concept that both land and sea belong to all, and that the right to breathe the air and bathe in the sea overrides a landowner’s right to privacy. Simon Winchester, a British-American author, has written 28 books between 1975 and the present. At least six of his books were New York Times bestsellers. Winchester was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in 2006. He lives in western Massachusetts. The Professor and the Madman, noted above, was published in England in 1998 as The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World By Simon Winchester HaperCollins Publishers, 2021 411 pages, hardcover The book is dedicated to Chief Standing Bear, whose image appears with the caption, “In 1879, the U.S. government declared this Ponca chief to be a ‘person’ under the law. But they still took away his lands.” The reader now has a taste of the flavor of the book.
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